IMPORTANCE OF THE IRISH DRAMATIC MOVEMENT
Yrd. Doç. Dr. Belgin ELBİR The general revival of drama at the end of the nineteenth cen-tury was the result of something more than the usual conjunction of talent, intellectual dimate, and social and economic factors. It came into existence by the determination of amateurs who could realize that dıama was unaware of the great changes in men and things the ceı;ıtury had witnessed.
In Britain, the seeds of this revival were scattered in London, in Glasgow, in Manchester, and most eftectively, in Dublin. Aİthough Ireland had given to the English theatre some of its most distinguished playwrights such as Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, the theatre in Iraland had neveı been more than a poor relation of the English theatre. In 1898, under the Icadership of William Buttler Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory and Edward Martyn, an attempi was made to establish an Irish Literary Theiltre. In his lecture deli-vered to the Royal Acaderİıy of Sweden on receiving the Nobel Prize, .Yeats chose as his theme "the Irish Dramatic Movemeı;ı.t" because he believed that the English committees would never have sent his name if he had written no plays, no dramatic criticism, or if his Iyric poetry had not a quality of speech practised upon the stage. About the Irish Dramatic Mavement, he said that the grcat mass of the Irish people were accustomed to political speeches and read littIe, so from the very start they had feh that they needed a theatre of their own. it was not, howevel', until he met in 1896 Lady Gregory,. a member of an old Galway family, that such a theatre
had become possible. .
After several years of experiment:ation with methods of writing and pıoduction, develaping both dramatists and an acting company, a series of appearances in. London attracted the attentian of the gene-rous Miss. Homiman who supplied the funds for a small Dublin playhouse which she rebuilt and presented to the company Thus, the Abbey Theaile became the permanent hcme of this company.
6 ' BELGiN ELBtR
The Abbey was a ıınique 'cstablislımenL First of all, its actors were mcstly amateurs with no training in the professional theatre, andits playwrights were mainly literary figures, not dramatists whose experience had been totaHy confined to writing drama. Se-conldly, in a period when the fashion WCl;S for reaEsm, the Abbey
was concernedwith the creatiOl) of the folk-play. The reason foı this was that the Irish National Theatre was onlyone part ofa general literary, cuItural and political rcnaissance intended to establish the Irish Heritage .. As Yeats said,. they were writing with the aim of prodııcing the image around tlıem:.
A play should tell the people of their own life of poetry where every man can see his qwn image. To ennoble the man of the roads, write of the roads, or of the people of romance, or the great historical people'1
Yeats's dramatization of the "life of poetry where every man ı:an see his own image" ma)' be rnore properly considered later with other attempts to establish a modern poetic drama. A modern poetic drama could only be created by men aware not only of the spirit (if their times,but of the poetic sytle which had been developed to give expression to that spiriL
In the creation of poetic drama W.B. Yeats played a major role. The necessities of the Trislı Renaissance drove him to thinking more precisely on the crcation of drama whose effects would remain after ,the fall of the curtain. He wanted to create a drama which would move the hearts and minds of men' in such a way that they would leave the theatre wiı:h a new understanding of their nature and fate. The poetic drama ~;hould be a living, not a literary thing; and in Yeats's' opinion living poetry could be found in thespeech of the Irish peasant and his fondness of theheroic end domestic in legend and daily life. The atternpts to establish poetic drama in the theatre of the last two centurİes had failed because the models were drawn from the past, or if the sul:~ect-matter was the reflection of contemporary life, the solutions were not modern. In other words, the solutions were in conflict with the spirit of the timc. Yeats thought that the revitalizing of the poetic tradition was tı) be accomplished in three ways. The dictionshould be sensuous and musical, the structure should be the "marshaHiııg of the Irish fragmentary beauties
Teigue Shemus
IMPORTANCE OF THE IRIS H DRAMATlC MOVEMENT 7
into great literature" as he put it; and the theme of this. drama should be chosen togive Ireland a constantly artistic conscience.
lı;ı Yeats's opinion, the dramatist should picture life in action, with an unpreocclrpied mind, as the musician pictured it in sound and the sculptor in form. An action, taken out of all other actions should be reduced to its simplest from, or at any rate to as simple a form as it could be brought to without the audience's losing the sense öf its place in the world. Moreover, the characters involved in the action should be freed from everything that was not a part of that action.
On'May 8, 1899 the Irish Literary Theatre opened its first season with Yeats's The Countess Cathleen. Irishmen protested against it as an insu1t to thefaith and to Irish womanhood.But English reviewers wrote in favour if it.
The play is about a woman's sacrifice of her soul for starving people. it is slıort and brief like most of Yeats's other plays; it is a one-act play with five short scenes. As charaCters we have Shemus, a peasant; and his wife, Mary; their sor Teigue; Aleel, apoet; The Countess Cathleen; her foster mother, Oona; and two Demop.s disguised as Merchants .. Thereare also peasant, servant of Countess .Cathleen, and Angelical beings. In the first scene we are in the room where Shemus and Teigue are talking. There is a. fire in the room, and through the open door, the trees of a wood can be seen. The scene has the effect of a painting. We leam that these peopleare starving when Shemus comes in. Apparently, he has not been able to find any food.
Then you have brought no dinner.
I sat among the beggars at the cross-roads, And held a hollow lıand among the others. Teigue You said that you would bring us food or money. Shemus What's in the house?
Teigue A bit of mouldy bread.2 While theyare talking, they hear music. Shemus Who's passing there?
And mocking us with music?3 2 W.B. Yeats, The C.oıı;ıtess Cathleell(London: 1929), p. IZ'. 3 İbid. p. 14.
8 BELGİN ELBİR
Cathleen, Oona and Aleel enter the room. Cathleeri realizes how poor and hungry these people are.
Cathleen : So you arcstarving even in this wood, / Where ihad thought iwould find nothing changed.4 She gives thern all the money she has. But that is not enough. So the family sell their souls to the two demoliS, disguised as .merchants. Only 1\1ary reflıses to do so. The demons tell Shemus and
his son to cry aloud at every house door that they buy men's souls: First .l.Vferchant: You've but to cry aloud at every cross,-road, At every house düor, that we buy men's souls. And give so güod a price that all may Eve . In mirth and comfart till the famine's done, Because we are Christian men.
Shemus Come, ler's away.
Teigue I shall keep running till I've earned the price.5 The .Countess, who is desperate to save the starving people, agrees to seIı her own soul to the demon~merchants. It is a difficult decision to make but she feels she has to. The peasants protest that • her soul is too valuable to Ibesold, bui she is determined. They kiss
her dress in gratitude. She dies. Her farewell speech is a good example of poetic language:
Cathleen B.end down your faces, Oona and Aleel, i gaze upon them as the swallow gazes Upon the nese under the eavc, begoreshe wander the loud water~. Do notweep
Too great a while, for there is many a candIe On the EJ:igh Altar through one fall. Aleel, who sang abouth the dancers of the woods,
That know not the hard burden of the world, Having but breatlı in their kind bodies, farewell! And farevvell, Oona, you who have played with me, And bore me in your arms about the house "Vheni wa.s but a child and therefore happy, Therefore happy, even like those that dance. The storm is in my hair and i must go.6
4 ibid., p. 17. S ibid., p. 31. 6 ibid., p. 99.
TMPüRTANCE.üF THE IRISH DRAMATlC MüYEMENt <)
Like this play, Yeats's plays are more lyrical than theyare dramatic. In The Countess Cathleen there is a crisis when Cathleen decides to give\her soul to Satan. All movement in the play is towards this end. The movement and the crisis are there to revea'ı emotion. Like all the drama of Yeats, this play is also a combination of spiri-tual, dramatic and poetic elements. The pattern is an extension of conventional verse. The progress in the play is from the inward to the outward, which creates a sensuous atmosphere. Symbolism in the play is the ageney that makes the universality of the theme ex-plicit. To take Yeats's play as the expression of personal lyrical states of mind would be only superficial reading. A1though a shOlt play, The Countess Cathleen is concerned with a great therne: Cathleen's sacrifice of self. This fact is true of Yeats's other short plays. Yeats was not the first to use symbolism in drama, but he is distinguished by his deliberate, free and 'intricate use of it. In The Countess Cathleen, while CatWeen is a symbol of self-sacrifice, the other character; Shemus, his son and all the rest who sell their souls are symbols of people who, when in poverty, are for.ced to give up all their spiritual values by their own instincts and not by any force from the outside. The vitality of Yeats's all dramatic works is also present in this play. This is the vitality both of contentand from. In Yeats, the su~ject for observation is the life of the soul and spiritual powers, and this is why the progress is from inward to outward, fıom unseen to seen. For Yeats, drama. has to use symbolism and personification. In The
Countess Cathleen we have the personification of the attractions of the
devil. Yeats makes use of music and supernatural elements such as angelic figures which are a fact of the action. The important thing is .the submission of a soul to the all-enveloping spritual mystery as in the case of Cathleen. In the combining of the elements of seen and unseen, of natural and supernatural, of human and divine, ,action' comes to have the force of symbol, or, as in The Countess Cathleen, symbol assumes the character of action. The world Yeats creates is not an un real one but it is very different from the world we are accustomed to find in drama.
Yeats had a life to express, he was apoet, and he had a sense for dramatic form. For the continuity of drama and its connection with the main stream of poetic writing, his work seems much more important than that of either Synge and the "realist."
Policeman B
BELGiN ELBiR
We said that Yeats can be ,considered the"most important creator of poetic drama. But the Irish Drama that really made the Abbey Theatre and the Irish Dramatic Movement effective was essentially a folk art which combined rea1ism of environment and character \ portrayal 0-ith the poetic colloquial dialogue: and temperament
of Ireland. it is true that the Irishdrama .suffered considerable li-. mitation because many of its writers turned their backs on Ibsen and the dtama of ideas. Yet Lady Augusta Gregory's formula, taken from AristotIe, "To think like a wise' man bu1: express oneself like the common people" was sufficient to produce work of more than provincial distinction. A1though Lady Gregory herself did not contri-bute profoundly, she brought peasant drama to the Abbey between 1906 and 1907 with one-ad plays.
'The Rising of the Moon' ü; a political one-act play. in this p'lay,
a police sergeant refrains from. arresting arebel who carries a temp-ting price on his head. The play takes place in a seaport town, during the night. it is a beautifliI nigh! and there is maanlight. There a(e three policeman, one of then is the sergeant. We leam from their talk that theyare looking for a rcbel who has managed to run away . from gaol. They put up anatice describing the man. The Govem-ment has offered a hundred pounds for him. But the policemen believe that any of the m who gets the man will be promoted:
A hundred pourids is little enough for the Gover-ment to oEferlor him. You may be sure any inan in the force that takes him will get prornotion. We alsa understand that theyare not so eager to find the man. But they feel that they have to do their duyt:
Policeman' X
Sergeant
And if wc got him itself, nothing but abuse on our heads for it from the people, and maybe from our own relations.
\Vell, we have to do our duty in the force. Haven't wc the whole country depending an us to keep law and order??
Theyare in a conflict. They have to do theirduty but they also feel sympathy for the rebeL. A ragged man appears when the sergeant
IMPüRTANCE üF THE IRısH DRAMATlC MüVEMENT 11
.
is alone. He says he i's a ballad-singer. They talk about the rebel and the ragged ~an makes the sergeant remember the timewhen he was young:
Man And inaybe thernan you are watching for tonight used to be sitting on the wall, when he was young, and singing those same songs;:.. it is' a queer world.
And isn't it a queer world?
Maybe it's one, of the boys youused to be singing withthat üme you will be arresting to-day or to-morrow, and sending into the dock .... 8 Finally, it comes out that the man is the one they have beeri laoking fo!. But the sergeant does not betray him and lets him go. Man Wen, good~night, comrade,' and than k you. You
did me a good turn to-night, and I'm obliged to you. Maybe I~II be abIe to do as much for you when we all changeplaces at the Rising of the
Moon.9 .
The lesson taught by Lady Gregory couldbe ,easily absorbed, and to her influence may be traced much of .the drama of the Irish stage. During the years when genius ôid not appear on the Abbey Stage it was good to have such plays, much better than the artificial ones so often favoured in London. Lady Gregory's dream was not her own but that ofher fellow creators ofIreland. And Lady Gregory's example .resu1ted in a deluge of peasantdrama and most important of all, the local-colour movement brought forth thegenius of John Millington Synge.
Synge left a legacy in his important work that helped to sustain for decades lreland's daim to an important place in the twentieth -century drama. A1though each of Synge's six plays is memorable,
The Playboy of the Western World
is
one of the must important twoplays. İn the preface to this play he dedares that all art was a collaboration and he had found the best collaborators in his simple
8 tbid., p. 86. 9 tbid., p. 91.
12 BELGiN ELBİR
neighbours. He also said that on stage there should be realityand joy. Although he was against 'photographic reality' on stage, he was aware of the problems of life. He "tried to escape from them in£i
back-to-nature romantic spirit. However, he was not a worshipper of the primitive.
He took note of the iııstability of the common man's affections in The Playboy
~f
the WesternWorld. As he had often done before, Synge took his subject-matter from an. actual. occurrence recorded in his travel-sketches in The Islaml. The backgıound of the play is a small wayside public house on the wild coast of Mayo. The Land-lord,Michael James Flaherty, is preparing to join in a wake at mid-inght, leaving his daughter, Margaret Flaherty (called Pegeen Mike), alone in the house. Shawn Keogh, a young farmer who is Pegeen's cousin comes in. He is an admirer of the girl and wants to marry her. But he is so much in awe of father Reilly, in other words the church, that he does not dare spend a night alone with his future wife. So, when a stranger appears on the scene she is ready to transfer her affeetions to him. The visitor, Christy Mahon, confesses that he has murdered his f::tther:Christy : Don't strike mc. i killed my poor father, Tuesday was a week, for doing the like of that.IO
After his confession, he beeomes an interesting figure to Pegeen and the others. Hunted by the police, he has now taken refuge in the publie-house. His faneiful story immediately makes him a po-pular hera. At the end of the [irst act, he is feeling very pleased with himself. During the following aet, Christy is still the star. Every girl in the neighbourhood is in love with him. He tells his story over and over again, adding exciting details eaeh time. Unfortunately, his father appears up on the scene aud Christy ruus away. The 10ve-sick widow helps him and wants to marry him. Christy tells her that he is in love with Pegeen. The widow offers to help him to win Pegeen. Christy is seen at the beginning of the third act as winner of the raees on the beach. Now he is ';the ebampion Playboy of the West". He has also won the love of Pegecn. But the "dead" Mahon arrives on the seene again. Christy att;::mpts to kill him to regain his former prestige but he [ails and. thi:, time his act is eonsidered a repulsive erime, even by Pegeen. People are abcut to kiİI the boy when his
IMPORTANCE OF THE IRISH DRAMATIC MOVEMENT 13
father saves him. The father and the son leave the angry villargers, and Pegeen mourns over her disillusionment:
Pegeen : Ouit my sight. Oh,. mygrief, I've lost the only Playboy of the Western World.ll
Through his mock-hero Christy, Synge aclıieves the most prccise exaggeration. Christy is a wonder to the people of Mayo and he talks himself into a wonder of his own imagination. Th~ people who turn hini into a hero suspend their moral judtement for the sake of a fine story, the story of a young man who has killed his father, the story of a "bravc" act. It is the disguised comedy and the irony that gives the play its quality. it can be said that the comedy is directed against the people of Mayo and alsa against the artist whose love of fine words is dangerous. The love of fine words for their own sake, symbolized in Christy is a form of the search for something ethereal and refined.
After Synge, for fifteen years, the Abbey Theatre lacked a play-wright of major standing, un til it presented O'Casey's Juno and the
Paycock in 1924. This play is, in the opinian of many, the best
pro-duct of Sean O'Casey's fusion of realism and poetry, of somber tra-gedy and'comedy. The play place in the apartment of the Boyle family in Dublin. \Ve have Jack Boyle, who is called "Captain", his wife Juno, their children Maryand Johnyas the most important figures. Theyare rather poor but Jack do es not like working. Johny is a desperate figure: he has lost his arm dming the Easter rebellion. He thinks he has done all he can for Ireland. The family rejoices at leaming from Charles Bentham that Jack Boyle has inherited a a [ortune. Mary falls in love with him and gives up her former intended, Jerry Nevine. But things turn out to be unhappy when they nnd out that they cannot, in fact, have the money. Another misfortune is Mary's beina pregnant by Bentham. Johny is killed by two rebels whosay that he has betrayed them. Their dream com es to an end; everything is worse than before. As J ack Boyle puts it, the whole world is in a terrible state of chaos. The language of the play is very power-ful. The speech in which Mrs. Boyle requests Christ's compassion is mcmorable:
Mrs. Boyle
11 İbid., p. 229.
... .'. . .. Mother o' Gad, have pity on us all!
i
ii
J4
i
lll
iBELGİN ELBİR
son was riddled with bullets, when me darlin' son was riddled with bullets? Sacred heart of jesus, take away our hearts o' stone, and give us hearts o' flesh! Take away this murderin' hate, an' give us
Thine own eternal love!12
As we have discussed, one of the most remarkable developments of the modern theatre was the rise of the Irish Drama. Ireland made no contribution to the stage in modern times until the last decade of the nineteenth century. Then it roused itself in respon~e to nati-onalistıc urges and gave the world the Abbey Theatre. Jreland's contribution was as timely asit was praisewoıthy. The romantic revalt against Realism wa:s beginning to lose its vitality. The Irish playwrights had the opportunity to give new life to drama by combinipg romanticism and realism. VVilliamBut1er Yeats's contribution lies in his successful efforts as one of the creators of poetic drama. One of the new writers,
J.
M. Synge was a superb artist who acquired extreme sensitivity to the nuances of comman life and most of his work provided a fusion of realityand imagination. While it was Lady Gregory who had brought peasant drama and local-colour to' the stage, Synge was the ar1:i5twho turned peasant drama into universal drama.He proved that there :is an English-language literature that is essentially Irish. The Irish Dramatic movement aıos produced a dramatist of first rank after the First World War, sumething that cannot be actually said for England. Sean O'Casey's powerful artistry linked him with the first period of the Abbeyand he proved himself capable of turning common life into poetry. But it was with a new realism that he made an important contribution to Irish, English as well as to world drama. He introduced a critical spirit, and an awareness of twentieth century conflicts in1:o the poetry of speech 'and mood already present in the Irish drama. This was important
not only for Irelar;ıd but for the rest of the English speaking world. The whole story of the collaboration 'bet~een Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory, with their prose writings, seems to be one of the most instructive events in recent: literary history. They made the literary world more aware of th~ difficu1ties of pİanning a literary renaissance and of the organic complexityof a flourishing dramatic tradition.
12 Sean O'Casey, Three Plays: Juno and the Payeoek, The Shadow of a Gunman, The Plough and the Star (London: 1930),p. 72.
